1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, a device, and a computer product for managing a communication situation between users of operation terminals or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, audio/graphics/video input devices, sensors, and displays, as well as electronic information operating devices including personal computers have been increasingly employed in communication settings such as conversations among users and meetings in which a numbers of users participate. When making a presentation, for example, data is projected by use of a projector, a personal computer monitor, or the like so that the data can be referred to during the talk or discussion. By use of an electric whiteboard, additional data can be written onto the presented information by detecting the position of a pen or fingertip that is placed for an operation on the electric whiteboard.
After such communication activities, or even during the activities, there may be a request for checking remarks made in the past or for finding a particular document. With a conventional technology, one has to remember the date and time of the past communication activity to search for a note, a document, or the minutes of the meeting that have been made before. Thus, the search is not very efficiently conducted.
On the other hand, if communication situations including explanations and presentations are organized in such a manner as “last week's explanation given from A to B” and “document provided by a participant in last meeting”, a search can be made by use of the communication situations. Such a technology would be preferable because the process procedure is similar to the behavioral pattern of a human being.
Furthermore, one may wish to check the history of the communications, asking whether person C has discussed a document regarding matter D. Thus, there is a need of managing communication situations in a manner that the communication situations can be individually recognized.
When a search is conducted by use of a communication situation, the following problem tends to be incurred. For instance, because a person to whom a document is presented often does not have information necessary to specify the document such as the name of the file, the person would use the communication situation as the only keyword, asking to send the document used in the meeting or to give the person some information on the document used in the meeting.
In response to the request as the above case the presenter of the documents may not be able to determine which document is requested if multiple documents that look alike are present, or if multiple documents are provided in one meeting. For this reason, it is preferable that the communication situations be managed by associating documents used in a communication activity with identifiable information.
As a method of reducing costs of searching for a document in relation to a communication activity in the past, technologies of co-managing documents and objects that are referred to afterward, within a group or the like. For instance, JP-A 2004-258802 (KOKAI) suggests a technology of managing and providing the history of operations made on objects such as documents. This operation history includes the history of co-operations.
The technology disclosed in JP-A 2004-258802 (KOKAI), however, is intended for document management within a registered meeting or group. Because the management body needs to be registered in advance, the process load is increased. In addition, because the documents are placed under the management of the meeting or group and browsed under this management, a search cannot be made by using a communication situation as a keyword as in the above case.
Contrary to the technology of JP-A 2004-258802 (KOKAI), a method of actively recognizing and managing the communication situations of the users based on an operation condition of devices may be adopted, without requiring advance registration of a group or the like. However, if a single machine is configured to perform information management for a number of users as in the technology disclosed in JP-A 2004-258802 (KOKAI), all the operations of the users have to be detected and all the speakers have to be identified on the single machine. This makes the structure of the machine too complicated.